Why Are We Still Using Income Tax Brackets?

To have a complete sliding scale and still maintain progressive tax rates, you would have to ratchet the scale up with the lowest possible increment, which in the case of a US Federal return would be one dollar. So the tax rate would theoretically start with the lowest tax rate at some level of taxable income and increment slightly for every dollar increase in taxable income until you reached the maximum rate. So for example using the 2011 single tax rates which range 25 percentage points from a low of 10% at $8,500 to a high of 35% at $375,150 of taxable income, that means you divide the 25 basis points by (375,150-8,500) 366,650 and get a marginal rate increase of .0000682 for every additional dollar increase of taxable income. Of course that does not even consider capital gains tax rates, yet if you ignore varying rates for items such as capital gains and self employment, you probably could program the scale above into tax software and have a true sliding scale of progressive tax rates. I have actually never seen anyone say, I don't want another dollar of income, because I will have to pay 35 cents of tax on that next dollar when I only paid 33 cents tax on the previous dollar, because you are still ahead a net 65 cents, so I am not convinced that tax brackets are that big of a problem.

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